Christ and Horrors: God's <i>advocatus diaboli</i>

Of all the things I struggle with in faith, the problem of gratuitous suffering is the biggest.

I few week ago I was having a difficult day. Not for me as much as for people I care about. In the middle of the day a student sent me an e-mail asking the question, "Is it okay to hate God?" And I said, "Sure. For a season it is okay to hate God."

All that reminded me of some e-mails I sent around a few years ago to some friend's espousing a vision of the cross I called, in half-jest, the advocatus diaboli heresy.

The Devil's Advocate--the advocatus diaboli--is the person appointed by the Catholic Church to argue against a person moving up the chain toward sainthood. The Devil's Advocate is to be, by appointment, a kind of curmudgeon. This mechanism is to ensure that the process is fair and that even the most unflattering evidence against the candidate gets full consideration. I recall a few years ago reading about the man appointed to be the Devil's Advocate against Mother Teresa (she was at the stage of "Blessed" at the time). Fun job, wouldn't you say, pointing out Mother Teresa's faults?

Given my issues with God I wondered, what if someone were appointed to be God's advocatus diaboli? What case would they bring against God? And, given that case, how would God respond?

In my mind, the Devil's Advocate would say something like this:

I am a Canaanite mother. I had my baby ripped from my breast and smashed to the ground by Israelites under Joshua's command. You, God, commanded the murder of my baby. And I witnessed it before I myself was brutally beaten to death. So, no, you cannot be the God for all people. You cannot ask for my love or loyalty. I am the advocatus diaboli against you.

I can imagine a long line of advocatus diaboli against God. The billions who have suffered horrors, some God-sanctioned, on this earth.

How could God defend himself against the Devil's Advocate? My answer for my friends followed the rhythm found in Jack Miles' book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, which is the sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize winning God: A Biography. Following Miles, here is how God might answer the advocatus diaboli:

...If God had to suffer and die, then God had to inflict suffering and death upon himself. But why would God do this?

Every perpetrator was first a victim. Behind every crime stretches a millennial history of earlier crimes, each in its way an extenuating circumstance. But to whom does this infinite regression lead in the end if not to God? The guilt of God is certainly not a Christian dogma, and yet it is an emotionally inescapable implication of the Christian myth, visible and audible in countless works of Christian art. The pathos of those artistic enactments--those masses and oratorios, passion plays and memorial liturgies, and above all those paintings and sculptures in which unspeakable is left unspoken--is inseparable from the premise that God is inflicting this pain upon himself for a reason. "The real reason," as Albert Camus wrote in his haunting novel The Fall, "is that he himself knew he was not altogether innocent." (p. 5)

To use the language of the myth, who is to be blamed for our expulsion from Eden? It is the Lord himself who cursed what he created...Our offense was so mild, his punishment so ferocious. Can we avenge ourselves upon him?

No. we cannot; we cannot make him "bear the awful curse" that he has inflicted on his creatures. But he can make himself bear it. And when he does, all lesser offense can be caught up in one primal offense, his own...In the words of Paul (2 Cor. 5:19), he can "reconcile the world to himself" and himself to the world. As God, the Lord cannot cease to exist; but as Christ, he can taste death. Betrayed and abandoned, he can breathe his last breath in pain. The myth that he once did so has within it...the power to still that rage against the universe which any individual history can engender. (p. 9)

The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it...the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it. The ultimately responsible part accepts his responsibility. And once he has paid the price, who else need be blamed, who else need be punished? (p. 12)

In the end, then, I argued this: Jesus died, not for our sins. Jesus died for God's sins.

Needless to say, none of my friends liked this formulation in the least. But for me, the formulation was cathartic.

But although cathartic my pet advocatus diaboli heresy wasn't very constructive. Recently however, I've discovered the book Christ and Horrors by Marilyn McCord Adams. The book is amazing, a constructive response to the horrors in the world. My response to my wife after reading the first chapter was, "Finally, a theologian that gets it."

So, this week I'm going to blog a bit about Christ and Horrors.